Can LeSean Thomas and Crunchyroll Team Up Again?

The year was 2017 and Crunchyroll was dropping an anime short. The anime short was called Children of Ether. It was co-produced by Crunchyroll and LeSean Thomas. LeSean Thomas is an African American story writer, artist, and animator. When the anime dropped on the Crunchyroll it was a glorious time. Social media blew up, it was featured in conventions and anime expos. It was a beautiful piece of African American first anime.

Then six months later everyone that was involved with the project moved on to other things. Years later LeSean Thomas went on to debut the anime Cannon Busters produced through Netflix. You can see the review here for that show. Crunchyroll went on to keep licensing shows and getting exclusive titles for its streaming platform. Children of Ether became a “remember that thing back in 2017.”

Many times, we’ve wondered why it was only a short and if it could be made into an actual series. Now, it’s 2020 and Crunchyroll has made its studio to produce original anime shows regularly. They unveiled Crunchyroll Originals to the masses in early January. Along with it came several anime titles that will be brought to their streaming site. We thought to ourselves this would be a great time for LeSean Thomas and Crunchyroll to make Children of Ether a full series. Even better yet this would be a great time for LeSean Thomas to make something brand new with Crunchyroll.

As an anime reporting outlet, we talk to Crunchyroll regularly and before Cannon Busters dropped on Netflix, we had several chats with LeSean Thomas on Twitter. Therefore, we figured we’d go to the sources to get some answers. First, we went to Crunchyroll and their public relations department had this to say.

We’re glad to hear that you’ve had the opportunity to chat with LeSean Thomas as we’ve seen his great success with “Cannon Busters” too. Crunchyroll is grateful to have had the opportunity to produce “Children of Ether” with him, but the project was intended to be a short. We are certainly open to collaborating with him again in the future to continue creating content for our audiences.-Crunchyroll PR Team

We then reached out to LeSean Thomas but as of this article date, we haven’t heard back from him or his team. Reports say that LeSean is still working with Netflix on other anime projects and we’re not sure if his contract is exclusive to them currently. Crunchyroll’s response made us ecstatic though to think that something can be done between the two again. Let the anime gods put these two together again and make a crazy great anime. Come on Kami-Sama!!